My Thoughts, Safe To No One
by Lala to the power of 2
Summary: Sobriety, among other things, isn't easy for the mentally unstable. Even for just a few hours.  AU
1. Prologue

He wished it had been an accident, like he'd told his uncle. He wished he had never done it at all. But as Gamzee Makara stared into the hole his uncle had dug, stared at the little tabby at the bottom, he knew. He had killed his beloved pet cat, the only friend he ever saw on his little island, and he didn't even know why he'd done it.

He had been petting her, and as she bared his throat to him with a purr to encourage he scratch there, too, the thought had come, suddenly and without reason. He had thought that even with his childishly small hands it would be so easy to wrap his fingers around that neck and just _twist_. How easy it would be take the life of this tiny creature, to kill it, to take away everything it will ever be, and make it nothing.

And before he knew what he was doing, his hands had clamped around that little furry neck and _squeezed_ .

The cat jerked and clawed at his arms, but Gamzee didn't let go - he just squeezed harder and gave a jerking twist. There was a sickening snap, and the tabby went limp in his hands, and it was only then that he realized what he had done.

He stared at the dead cat, still in his lap, and at his hands, scratched open and leaking blood, and he began to cry. He had no idea what just happened. He didn't know why he had done that, or why when the cat started howling and clawing in desperation he didn't think to let go – he didn't have any thoughts, just instinctively moved and instinctively killed it.

His uncle looked back at Gamzee when he was done filling the hole and patting the earth flat. He looked like he had wanted to say something comforting, but instead he stared at Gamzee's bandaged hands and arms, and Gamzee knew there was a slight fear in his eyes.

He didn't blame his uncle. He was scared, too.

Gamzee Makara was seven years old when he first realized there was something very, very wrong with him.


	2. A Single Hour

Notes: This fic is cathartic because I am also insane (if admittedly less so) and needed an outlet. All perspective changes are intentional. Also, I've only been to court once for a traffic ticket and can barely recall any details form the matter, so I may have accidentally made things up. I'll assume I didn't, but you never know when you're wrong, right?

* * *

><p>Gamzee's foot bounced with unconscious impatience, rattling the single uneven leg of the chair he sat on. He cast his eyes around the waiting room in the courthouse once more, focus landing on the board where it said it scheduled appearance (among many, many other names and times.) The information had not changed- it still said his appointment was at 10:30am, and it being 11:00 wouldn't change it. He knew this, and he knew when he showed up at 10 that he could easily be waiting for hours before the judge could see him, but it didn't change the bored impatience dictating that he check again in case the screen decided that it was going to tell him everything was delayed and he could go home; nor the slight paranoia suggesting that he was here on the wrong day or had already missed his turn.<p>

He sighed, and leaned back in the slightly unbalanced chair. It was only a fifth-degree assault charge that would most likely end in a large fine and nothing else, but since this was not his first offense the possibility of a year in jail did exist. And waiting to find out if you'll owe the government the next three months rent or a year of your life was not exactly a relaxing environment.

He wished he could have a smoke to take the edge off this stress. Nothing stops an impending mental breakdown quite as well as a good fattie.

Fuck, why had he even hit that guy? Some jerk-off hitting on a fifteen year old girl didn't have anything to do with him. But he had been out all day on the streets performing until his morning buzz had worn off and just sitting down to have a relaxing slice of pie for lunch, and he had been so annoying and that little girl had just looked scared when he wouldn't go away, and that line of tension that was always in the back if his mind had snapped and his fist had been moving even before he could think about it. He managed to stop himself after just the one hit, this time, but that didn't change the fact that he was here in court just because that guy had been irritating. That silly teenage girl hadn't even been in danger- Prospit Avenue had been crowded, like usual, so there was no way the jackass would have actually tried anything.

At least the first incident had come with the satisfaction of beating someone into a bloodstain. You barely had a single fleck of pretty red on your hand after you punched that guy.

But no matter. Gamzee was here because he lacked self-control, as always, and now he'd just have to wait to see what his obviously well-deserved punishment would be. Even if you kind of wished you could have gotten a few more good hits in, seen the fucker cough up some of his lovely red blood. Gotten it all over your hands, maybe, and then with the next hit you'd stain that low-life's face with his own blood. Paint his face with it, all nice and pretty. He certainly would have looked better with it covering his shit-stain of an ugly-ass face.

Okay, this was not where he needed to be right now. Right now Gamzee needed to be sane. The more sane he is, the less likely jail time, right? Right. No crazy.

He leaned forward in his seat again, and this time looked around at the other people in the room. A house-wife type, probably here for a traffic ticket. A lot of the fuckers here looked like they were here for stupid petty shit like that. A sea of plain faces with plain, average skin tones that spoke not of peasantry or nobility - just people. That's why they'd abolished that stupid caste system anyway, right? Skin color was a stupid way to judge anything. It had been a good revolt. You wished you'd have been old enough to participate, to have an excuse to tear people open in the name of social change, to kill some smug high-blooded asshole and twist his intestines into a goddamn balloon animal.

Oh wait, except you were born into nobility, and you'd have been on the other side of that revolt. Okay, then you wished you could've choked the life out of some stupid gutter-blooded peasant trying to change the word with a pitch fork and a wal-mart pistol. Whatever, you weren't picky. Didn't matter whose head you got to smash.

Ah, except that Karkat and Tavros were Gamzee's two favorite people in the world, and they had the darkest skin out of anyone he knew. Well, except Aradia, but he didn't really know that sister very well. Either way, it was good that Gamzee had been a little kid during Alternia's revolution. Obviously. Because killing was bad.

He looked over at the clock again. 11:15.

Mother FUCK, what was TAKING so long? You want to tear that worthless fucking clock off the wall and just fucking BREAK it over someone's head, watching the little plastic shards stab into their skin and-

God damn, this was gonna be long wait. He really wished he could've smoked a bowl this morning.

Karkat was gonna be pissed as hell when he got home. He had been pissed off when Gamzee had gotten that citation in the first place, and he didn't even know how big the fine would be. If there was one.

Right, this is why Gamzee was clean and sober and wearing clean clothes. Because he needed to NOT go to jail. Because Karkat would never speak to him again if he was in lock-up for a year, and without Karkat the only thing stopping Gamzee from completely losing his mind was marijuana and the power of positive thinking. Which was fine, because Karkat needed him, too – the self-loathing little workaholic would neglect eating and sleeping entirely without someone to cook and drag his ass off to bed, and if Gamzee was gone then there were a very limited number of people who could look out for him. And even fewer that he'd actually listen to. In fact, Gamzee was pretty sure Karkat only actually ever listened to Kanaya among them. And she had her own life and her own shit and Gamzee wouldn't want to put such a nice sister out of her way by asking her to take care of Karkat for a year because Gamzee was too much of a crazy fuck-up to even stay out of jail.

Right. He could do this. He had already been sober since like, nine in the morning. What is that, two hours? Two hours is nothing. Gamzee could be sober for days on end without snapping. This was fine. Everything was cool.

Of course, usually when he was sober he had something to do and think about other than waiting to discover his fate and if his life was going to be completely ruined because he waited too long to eat a goddamned slice of pie while some jackass had been a creep nearby. And if he DID go to jail, who the fuck was he kidding, there was no way in hell he'd get out in just his sentenced year. Because he wouldn't have enough anti-crazy medication in there, even though he was fairly certain there was some prison bartering system and that grass was probably a product featured therein. There wouldn't be enough to keep him from violence, even if prison and jail were two completely different things and he didn't know how many people he'd get a chance to interact with and therefore how many people would be able to make him want to kill them. In fact, maybe there was no bartering system in county lock-up. Maybe he'd be completely sober all year. And maybe he'd try to strangle one of the guards with a tube sock.

The clock now read 11: 21. This was not a good day. He REALLY wished he had grass right now.

No, it was cool. Everything was cool always and forever, and Gamzee would keep his cool, and everything would work out peaches and motherfucking daisies. Daisies, goddamn it. Totally fucking daisies.

And now his own thought process had stopped making sense again. Joy. He really needed to get better at distracting himself without weed.

"Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener~! That is what I'd truly like to be~e~e~! 'Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener~! Everyone would be in love with me~!"

WELL. That had been a fun way to waste fifteen seconds. Plus now the whole room was looking at him, so that was fun, too. Yep. Great idea all-around, that had been.

Fuck, was this ever boring. Weed was good for curing boredom. And craziness. Pity it wasn't an option. Instead, Gamzee's options were pretty much limited to trying to strike up conversation with one of the equally bored-looking people in the room or, dread of dreads, thinking more.

That had never ended well. Unfortunately, trying to start a conversation with a total stranger in a courthouse doesn't typically end well either, as Gamzee had learned from his last... incident. For some reason people tend to get less friendly when they're in trouble with the law. Which was silly, really because wasn't that when you need a friend the most? Whatever. Everyone probably already thought he was – **knew** he was crazy after his impromptu musical number anyway. Especially that house-wife-y woman. She was watching him like she was afraid he'd flip his lid and pull out a gun and start shooting the place up, or something equally silly.

Such a silly, silly thought. You'd never use a _gun_. They were much too impersonal. How were you supposed to relish the crack of broken bones and the squish of smashed organs with a _gun?_ Just one little twitch of the finger and the whole thing's over, and where is the fun in THAT?

Whoops, there he went off track again. What to think about, what to think about... Something fun. What were fun things? That time everyone had gone to the beach together, that had been fun. Having been, as usual, pretty high at the time Gamzee couldn't remember all the details, but he remembered important parts. Like when Nepeta had crawled on Equius's shoulders and demanded that someone play chicken with them, and so he'd ended up with Terezi's thighs wound around his neck as the two girls tried to push each other into the water. Equius was much sturdier than he was, though, so even with their nearly equal height a good shove from Nepeta had sent him off balance and falling into the water with a flailing law-student clawing at hair for support after only a minute or two of struggle. On the next round, he was pretty sure he remembered watching Vriska trying to kick out Feferi from under Aradia (or wait, had it been Feferi? Sollux had been dating Aradia at the time, so maybe it had been him instead? Then why had he thought it was Feferi? Whatever, it wasn't important) as Tavros tried to explain that she was cheating as he clung to her long hair and tried not to fall off her shoulders. Not having legs, Gamzee reflected, had probably made it harder to support himself up there. No wonder Vriska had resorted to kicking.

And he recalled how Karkat had looked after Vriska and Sollux had formed an unlikely alliance to toss him into the water when he'd refused to swim. Pissed off and soaking wet, and Nepeta and had said something teasing about "Kar-kitty not liking the water" and everyone had laughed, ignoring the short Cancer's vehement curses at everyone and everything in the universe.

And Gamzee remembered how afterwords on the ride home the two of them had been stuffed together in Kanaya's back seat (he had been in the middle- who else was sitting next to him? He couldn't recall.) and Karkat had said he looked much less ridiculous without his makeup on, and Gamzee had decided that it was supposed to be a compliment and returned it by saying that Karkat looked cute when he was wet, and then followed it with "Oh, look, you're even _cuter_ when you blush," and had gotten a sharp elbow to his gut in retaliation.

Yeah. That had been a good day. And look, thinking about it had wasted over five minutes. That was good, too, right?

No, not right- what the FUCK is five GODDAMN minutes when you've already been waiting for over a motherfucking hour and had god-knows how much longer left to go? And that fat fucking cunt with the giant purse is watching you like you're a fucking time bomb about explode AGAIN, or maybe still, who the fuck knows or cares, and what right did some know-nothing slut have to judge you when she was in court, just the same? You wanna gouge her eyes out with her own nail file and watch as she howls and stumbles around the room blindly, frantically trying to run from you or to help but after she trips over the first chair you'll catch up and then cut her tongue out and dip it into her naked eye sockets, and then you can paint her with her own blood using her own tongue as a brush, and it would be so fucking _beautiful_, you love the way blood is orange when it's thin and near black when it's thick, and you could paint a rainbow of reds onto her flesh, carve scenes into her skin-

OKAY STOP. Stop. Stoppitystopstopstop. That poor woman was probably watching Gamzee because he had started twitching like the motherfucking psycho he was. She was not at fault. And she probably had kids or something. Imagine how sad her theoretical kids would be if Gamzee did that? Very. And sad children weren't fun. Nothing fun about that. Nothing fun at all about, say, stabbing their mother in the fleshy joint between shoulder and chest and the backs of her knees with ball-point pens while they watch and scream and bawl their little eyes out, and then you'd set her on fire and since you'd stabbed her knees she can't get up to run around anymore, but you can shove one of her kids into her flaming arms and watch as they burn togethe

A joint would be GREAT. Really, really, REALLY great. You can imagine the feeling of that sweet, hot, stinging smoke filling your lungs, and even the thought is almost enough to calm you, a little. A nice big hit would be so fucking perfect right now, because then Gamzee would be able to chill the fuck out and not think about murdering innocent mothers in front of their children. And that's allways good. Gamzee much prefers NOT fantasizing about death. Hence his dependence on herb.

11:36. If this went on much longer, Gamzee was royally FUCKED. It was getting harder to keep a stable train of thought. But, it was already an hour past his appointed time, and the longer he waited the less time he would have TO wait, right? Right.

Gamzee forcefully slowed his breathing and stilled his twitching body, running his hands down his face to still the convulsing muscles around his eye with his fingers. Deep breath in, hold, exhale. Repeat. Make a game out of it. See how long you can hold your breath before the burning in your lungs forces it out of you. You're a fucking pothead, anyway- no one can hold their breath as long as potheads and long-distance swimmers, that was just a common fact. Well, not fact- it was a generalization, which is then slightly different form a stereotype, but whatever. None of that mattered. Was mattered was right now was breathing, or not breathing, and nothing else. If you get bored of counting the seconds you can hold your breath, count sheep instead. Cute little lambs hopping over a fence, one for every second that passes. Good. Still boring, but good. Relaxing. Motherfucking _excellent._

Finally, after what seemed like another hour of just concentrating on breathing but had only actually been a few minutes, the next group of people were called in- including Gamzee himself. There would still be more waiting as the judge called all of the people who needed to dispute up one by one, but the worst of it was nearly over. And as long as Gamzee kept breathing and didn't think about what was at stake, he'd be fine. He could do this. Everything was going to work out just fine. Probably.

–

An hour later, Gamzee was home with a new 3,000$ fine to his name. Bad, but he'd live- even if this meant he'd have to get a real damned job, or even worse sell more weed than he smoked for a while, as long as he had Karkat he was pretty sure things would be okay.

And as he finally lit up a bowl and dragged the stinging-sweet, warm-acrid vapor into his lungs and held it, for the first time all day Gamzee didn't have to _hope_ everything would be okay. Because as the calm oblivion of intoxication set in, slowly blurring his tumultuous thoughts and loosening the ever-present knot of angry tension in his chest and mind, he _believed_ it instead.

Everything really WAS going to be okay. It always was, and always would be. Not a motherfucking thing in this whole glorious universe was gonna bring him down. Why would it? Everything in the world was beautiful, and everything was fucking miraculous.

Miracles, man; motherfucking miracles. Seriously.


End file.
